The 99th edition of the Comrades Marathon, and the 50th Up Run from Durban to Pietermaritzburg, will set off on Sunday 14 June with a 22,000-runner entry cap and a substantially redesigned start format. The Comrades Marathon Association (CMA) has moved away from the single-mass-start model the race has used for decades, splitting Sunday's field into three sequentially released groups designed to give every batch usable road on the early climb out of Durban and to reduce the dangerous bottleneck the race saw between Tollgate and Westville last year.
Group 1, made up of the elite field and seeding batches A through G, will be the largest of the three at roughly 9,952 runners. Group 2 and Group 3, drawn from the remaining seeding batches, will be released in sequence behind it once the road ahead clears. The crucial change for finishers is that the race clock starts at the firing of each group's own start gun rather than the elite gun — meaning a runner in Group 3 still gets the full 12 hours from their own start, not a shortened window. The CMA has been clear that there is no time penalty for being in a later group; the change is about traffic on the road, not about cut-offs.
The course remains the official 85.777 km from Durban City Hall to the Scottsville Racecourse in Pietermaritzburg, climbing the Up Run's traditional sequence of Cowies Hill, Field's Hill, Botha's Hill, Inchanga and the final pull over Polly Shortts before the descent into the finish. The race has retained the 12-hour total cutoff but reorganised the intermediate cut-offs along the route so they line up consistently with each group's own start gun. Pacing bus organisers have spent April and May rewriting their splits on that basis, and the elite seeding still occupies the front of Batch A as it has done historically.
The headline competitive question, on a course the women's race has dominated narratively for three years, is whether Gerda Steyn returns to defend her 2025 Up Run win. As of mid-May the CMA had not formally published its elite entry list, but Steyn confirmed at the Two Oceans pre-race press conference in April that Comrades remained her primary 2026 target. The men's race, after Tete Dijana's 2024 and 2025 dominance, is wide open: South African distance runner Edward Mothibi and Russian-born Sergey Shvets are both back, and the Bonitas team has built its full June programme around the race.
Comrades' broader story this year is the 50th Up Run anniversary itself. The CMA has confirmed that the 14 June broadcast on SABC will run for the full 12 hours of the race, with a 50-Up retrospective interspersed through the morning programme. Spectators along the Pinetown to Hillcrest stretch have been asked, again, to keep at least one lane of the N3 service road clear after the early-morning hazard reports the race ran last year; the CMA, the Department of Transport and KwaZulu-Natal traffic authorities have all signed off on the new three-group plan, and the four-week countdown into Comrades 2026 begins this week.